Reading between the lines

A new work of "faction" fills in the gaps in the life of one of our greatest men of letters.

In The British Museum Is Falling Down, David Lodge had Adam Appleby, weary young father and James Joyce fan, maintain that "literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round." Between arguably inventing science fiction and championing an idealistic socialist state, the author HG Wells totted up a chaotic roster of wives, insatiable lovers and suicidal mistresses, not to mention love children. In Wells, subject of his new novel, A Man Of Parts, Lodge, one of our funniest writers, has perhaps found the perfect character for the thinking-man's bedroom farce.

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By 1913, famous and blessed with the long-suffering Mrs Wells - typing his manuscripts, entertaining his vast coterie and apparently accepting of his thinking about free love (for men, at least) - Wells could happily avow that life could very easily be about sex, children and literature. He promises the young novelist Rebecca West that his wife will take their love child "in her stride", and is taken aback when, "In fact Jane came very near to losing her temper with him on this occasion. 'For God's sake, HG!' she exclaimed... 'Not again!'" The comic understatement is perfect.

Wells saw the 21-year-old West, a woman of whom most men would probably have been terrified, as a cat ready to pounce. He nicknamed her Panther and himself Jaguar and, throughout their decade-long affair, the pair enjoyed what Lodge mischievously imagines as "torrid jungly" sex. There is much discussion of stroking, biting and claws, with West, the near-militant feminist, reduced to "purring" in the arms of her lover. They are "two big cats mating in the jungle". Far from getting carried away, Lodge is only making use of colourful correspondence. Wells wrote enthusiastically of coming up to town for "a snatch at your ears and a whisk of your tail". The feline fixation even went as far as naming their son Anthony Panther West, something for which, along with making him believe, for years, his father was his uncle, Anthony can't have been grateful.

Each faithless imbroglio was faithfully reported to Jane for her permission. His last great love, Moura Budberg, an acolyte of Gorky and possibly a Russian spy, was different. He became "reconciled to not knowing whether she was telling him the truth about anything.

She regarded reality as something that could be patted and prodded and twisted like a child's modelling clay to produce all kinds of interesting and attractive shapes according to the needs of the moment..." Of novelists like Lodge, who research with a historian's eye for detail but write with the lying lover's elasticity with the truth, the cynical could say the same. However, this would be to do this kind of richly realised "faction" a disservice.

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In the "penny life", the HG Wells beyond his novels emerges as a cliché: born in Bromley, the fame- drunk suburban creature running wild; the rich Edwardian old goat, only too happy to indoctrinate young lovelies in modernity (that is sex), in between dashing off his acclaimed prophecies of the future. But while no episode is spared, Lodge makes the subtleties of the contradictions just as important. As his Wells concurs, his love life is a mess of "casual promiscuity mixed in with the search for the perfect mate". The pre-war larks are framed with Wells' life at the end of WWII.

Conscience is his harshest critic. A kind of Lynn Barber of the mind, Lodge goes straight for the jugular of the jaguar: would these women not have been better off if he'd left them alone? Did he not ruin their lives? The interweaving of conscience and caper is completely engrossing.

From Capote to Mailer and Wolfe, faction at its (usually American) best has traditionally been the nonfiction novel: facts presented with the help of a novelist's box of tricks. This kind of British faction, though, takes the thoroughness of journalistic research as the place where the novelist's work starts. Beryl Bainbridge's final novel returns to the faction genre of

According To Queeney, but in a far more recent setting.

The Girl In The Polka Dot Dress is based on a key witness to the assassination of Robert Kennedy, a girl visible in footage from the Ambassador Hotel, but never traced. The imaginative gaps in history - be they unrecorded conversations between lovers, or lost spectators - are where faction really takes flight.

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Novelists of Wells' kind, whose lives fed exhaustively into their fiction, have a funny relationship with facts. On the one hand, they are at their disposal, to shuffle like a pack of cards, to select and discard or to reveal. On the other, to do so makes them vulnerable to their lives being read through their work. The worst scandals in Wells' private life occurred not when events took place but when he couldn't resist turning his amorous adventures into novels. We might not be so prudish today, but we do exactly the same to our writers, collectively sure that they are incapable of making anything up.

Perhaps in another century, Wells, the 19th-century man who saw the future, would have to be like Martin Amis, instructing his agent to put off his biographer - apparently obsessed with working out what in his novels is "real" - or, failing that, like other thoroughly modern men, getting a super-injunction to keep his love life and love children out of the press. It's possible that the strange genre of near truth is back in fashion because in faction, somehow, there's a last vestige of freedom.